it seems strange that the one intersection of economic status and subject that boys excel at is being attributed to environmental factors like gender roles(which western culture is seeking to reduce/eliminate) but there is no investigation to the massive discrepancy in the reading gap.<p>>High-income parents spend more time and money on their children, and invest in more stereotypical activities, researchers said, enrolling their daughters in ballet and their sons in engineering<p>>The gender achievement gap in math reflects a paradox of high-earning parents. They are more likely to say they hold egalitarian views about gender roles. But they are also more likely to act in traditional ways – father as breadwinner, mother as caregiver<p>>There is also a theory that high-earning families invest more in sons, because men in this socioeconomic group earn more than women, while low-earning families invest more in daughters, because working-class women have more job opportunities than men.<p>When boys start outperforming girls, the authors attribute it in part to parental bias towards boys, or societal expectation, but girls succeeding across entire economic ranges in reading is just par for the course.<p>Even at the end of the article the focus is on undoing what the authors consider to be the boys' edge in mathematics by balancing expectations between genders (read, encourage girls and manage boys expectations) to increase achievement for girls, even though they admit these expectation support boys flourishing just slightly.<p>>One way to boost achievement in math, researchers say, is to avoid mention of innate skill and stress that math can be learned. Another is to expose children to adults with different areas of expertise, and offer a wide variety of activities and books. Gaps are smaller when extracurricular activities are less dominated by one gender.